


Beauty Throughout History

by rowanrt7



Category: The 100, The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Art and nudity, Fluff, One Shot, Teacher!Bellamy, Teacher!Clarke, Well - Freeform, but its not sexual, fluff!, i mean be warned there is nudity, not really - Freeform, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 04:37:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4990510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowanrt7/pseuds/rowanrt7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>College Professor AU! Clarke, the young art teacher,  has her model cancel at the last minute, so she fills in herself. Bellamy Blake, the head-in-the-clouds history teacher, suddenly finds himself interested in art.</p><p>I've seen a lot of these floating around but with Bellamy as the model, and I wanted to reverse the perspective!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beauty Throughout History

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick piece I did. I know the art teacher thing is kinda played out but I wanted to see Clarke as the model rather than Bellamy. That makes more sense to me; she being into art.

The grey silk of Clarke's robe swept the wood-planks of the art studio. It was the kind of robe that was almost a dress, with sleeves that bloomed at from the elbow to the wrist where they gathered tightly. 

A dozen faces turned towards her, the set vacant faces of twelve senior students. Students who had seen it all before. Their heads peeped out from behind their easels, lining up pencils, fidgeting with the canvas, or simply staring off into space.

Like all the art rooms, it was more window than chalkboard. The easels clustered in a semi-hemisphere around a puddled sheet and a chaise lounge hauled up from the drama department. It was battered velvet, and spilled stuffing at odd intervals, leaving yellow crumb chunks on the cream of the sheet. A small whiteboard was jammed between two windows, more vertical space than horizontal.

"This is Art 450," Clarke said, scribbling it across the board as she spoke. Beneath it she wrote her name in smooth script. "My name is Clarke. You can call me Professor Griffin, but since I've had--" she paused, tallying the faces. "every single one of you before, I figure we can be informal."

That brought a few smiles to faces. "Nice to see you, Miss Griffin," said a boy in the front row. His ears stuck out from his hair, the same way his paintbrushes sprouted from a jar.

"Jamie, what did I literally just say?" The back row, a trio of girls, chuckled into their hands.

"This is Advanced Life Drawing. Everyone aware of that?" A few feeble nods. "Excellent. So this will be a shock to no one."

Clarke unbuttoned the cuffs of her robe. "Thirty minutes for pose one. Pencil only. We're not working with color today. Pay particular attention to shadows and shape." The students shuffled their pencils, and sat straighter. A few looked towards the door, waiting for the model. 

Clarke loosened the tie on her robe, and let it puddle on the floor. Beneath it she wore not a stitch of clothing.

The sleepy silence tightened into alarm. Jamie's face turned the color of a tomato. The three girls' eyes grew wide. One of them dropped her pencil. Clarke arranged herself on the chaise lounge, tossed her curls over the shoulder closest to the students, and tilted her nose to the sky, her face in profile. She had one knee pulled up, the other leg slid halfway off the chaise, her bare toes grazing the floor. She propped her head on one hand, making a triangle with her elbow. It wasn't the most comfortable of positions but it displayed shapes and angles.

After a few beats of motionlessness, the students set to work. The scratching of pencils and the occasional cough filled the air. Clarke tried not to blink. It had been a few years since her own art student years. Only a few, but it was long enough that she had fallen out of practice vis a vis modeling. The egg timer clicked steadily in the background, and Clarke tried to concentrate on the white noise and not on the tension in her muscles from holding her pose.

The door slammed open. "Ms. Griffin, I have that book you wanted!" Twelve heads swiveled towards the door, pencils poised in their still fingers. Clarke looked over more slowly, reluctant to lose her pose.

Bellamy Blake, the new history teacher, stood in the doorway with a coffee-table book. Several papers fluttered around his frozen figure, having escaped from the book in question. Although she couldn't read the title from where she sat, she knew what it was. Female Beauty Throughout History. She had asked him to keep an eye out for it several days ago, but she hadn't expected such a quick turnaround. Or for that matter, him to burst in while she was posing nude for her art class.

Jamie's blush when she'd disrobed was no match for Bellamy's now. He clutched the book to his chest, a deep glow covering his freckles. The papers settled on the floor but Bellamy made no move for them. Clarke made no move to cover herself; the egg timer ticked in the background, and she was a consummate professional.

"I um I didn't realize you were...teaching. I'll just come back--later." But he didn't move. He didn't even look away. He couldn't. He took her in fragments. The arch of her back, like the curve of the Colosseum window. The curve of her hip, like an ionic column. Her skin, glowing like Botticelli's Aphrodite. He swallowed.

The egg timer binged. "You're in luck class," Clarke said calmly as she stood. "You get a few minutes to finish up." She pulled her robe on, and tied it securely. "Mr Blake and I will be outside."

As she left the room, she heard the class burst into laughter. 

Clarke inspected Bellamy as she followed him out of the room. He was one of the cuter history teachers, she'd give him that. The scruff of his hair tickled his collar; he’d forgotten to get it cut. He dressed as if his only experience with professors was what he'd seen on T.V. He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow-patches, and often a bow-tie. Today, his bow-tie was blue. Up close, she could see tiny yellow ducks marching along the crease. 

As soon as the door was closed, Clarke gestured to the tie, suppressing a grin. "Who buys your clothes Blake?"

He tugged nervously at his tie. "My sister," he muttered. "I'm sorry about bursting in like that. I could've sworn you had planning at this time."

"It got rescheduled. Those are my senior art majors.”

“And you were...?” He trailed off, his eyes dipping involuntarily to the v at her neck where her robe drew together.

“My model fell through at the last minute. Couldn’t disappoint on the first day.”

“You certainly don’t,” he said quietly. The words were out before he could stop them. .

Clarke raised her eyebrow. “What was that?” Bellamy shrugged and shuffled his feet on the ground. "I'll take my book now," she said flatly, holding out her hand. He looked from her hand to her face for several scattered seconds before remembering the title in hand. 

"I'll need it back by the sixth week of the quarter,” he said, crossing his arms. 

"Specific," Clarke smiled. 

“Well, I have a curriculum to uphold,” he said stiffly. “Education is the heartblood of our society.” He scuffed his toe along the floor. “I’ve actually been looking into my own education. Art, specifically. There’s only so much to be done as an observer of art. I think I’d like to create. How can I sign up for the art classes here?”

Clarke crossed her arms. “You want to sign up for the art classes here? Like Advanced Life Drawing?”

“Is that--what that was?” He gestured to the door. Through its cross-hatched window, several faces whipped away, as if they had been looking forward all along. 

“Yes,” Clarke said, dragging the word out.

“Yeah like that. That looked good.”

Clarke gave her smile free reign. “As a teacher, you have the option to audit any class. There’s an hour left if you’d like to sit in.”

Bellamy nodded his head like a jitterbug. “Yes I would, yes. Sounds like an educational experience.”

Clarke turned on her bare heel, and yanked the door open. Ella, one of the back-row trio, knocked her easel over in her attempt to appear casual. Clarke wove through the uneven rows, and stood in front of the class. She took up her chalk again. The art buildings were the last to be updated--it’s not like they were important, or relied on the visual medium or anything.

“Class, we have a new student. Everyone say hello to Professor Blake, who will be auditing our class today,” she said without looking at anyone.

“Hello Professor Blake,” the class chorused with varying degrees of sincerity.  
With her chalk, Clarke pointed to the storage cabinet in the corner. “Extra easels and canvases are in there. Who wants to lend the professor a pencil?” Ella, of the recently retrieved easel, handed Bellamy one of her extra pencils with a blush. Bellamy assembled his easel and canvas with clumsy hands, aware every shuffling noise in the silent room. No one looked at him per se, but they were all aware of his every movement. 

Clarke waited until Bellamy had gathered himself. Many seconds passed in awkward silence; Clarke pursed her lips in an approximation of sternness. Jamie could tell it was a smile.

When he had finally settled down, Clarke continued. “Alright class, who is familiar with Boreas by John William Waterhouse?” Twelve hands went up with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Only Bellamy looked confused. The students side-eyed him. 

Bellamy held his hands up defensively. “What? I know who John William Waterhouse is. I don’t have to know every painting he’s done!”

“Ella, what year was Boreas painted?” Clarke asked, pointedly ignoring Bellamy’s outburst.

Ella looked at Bellamy as she answered. “1903.” Bellamy pulled a face at her.

“And what was its purpose Marie?” Clarke asked.

“To demonstrate the motion of the wind in cloth. Unrelated, it caused quite a scandal when it went missing for ninety years.”

Clarke swiveled her chalk to the front row. “And how do we know that Jamie?”

“Because you told us about it in Art 358 Miss Clarke.” Everyone turned to look at Bellamy, who fiddled with the pencil in his hand and ignored them.

Clarke laughed. “Okay, enough torturing Mr. Blake. Let’s move onto pose 2. 30 minutes in pencil. We’re doing Boreas, without cloth. Or a wind machine. I need you to make me believe the motion.” She reached over and twisted the egg timer and nestled it on the chalkboard shelf.

The class shuffled their papers around as Clarke slipped off her robe. She drew her arms up, one twisted in her hair, the other wrapped around her neck. She perched on the edge of the chaise lounge, resting on her tiptoes. She closed her eyes, and tried to settle into the empty space in her mind. But she couldn’t get over the feeling of being watched. It wasn’t anything new; she’d been a life-model before, many times. It was different, she thought, when it was art students. Bellamy Blake definitely wasn’t that. She expected his eye was less objective than that of her students. Though Jamie in the front row had given her the eye more than once. That thought made her smile reflexively for just an instant. Then she calmed herself back into art-model putty.

Bellamy was finding it hard to concentrate. Nudity usually wasn’t a problem for him, but extricating the idea of Clarke from the idea of nudity was causing a problem for him. The actual sketching was easy enough--his focus in history was in architecture, and he’d done enough building sketches to have a grasp on form, shadow, line.

That’s what he had to do. He had to treat her like a building. A blonde, busty building. He emptied his mind of everything except controposos and romanesque architecture. After a few minutes, he turned entirely inward to the drawing under his hands.

The chicken timer rang, jerking Clarke out of her reverie. As she dressed, she shifted away from them. Bellamy swallowed. His careful distancing snapped. When she had posed, he had equated her to a building, to a painting--something from two hundred years ago maybe, but certainly something stationary. Then she’d moved. Suddenly, she was flesh and blood, a star, not a nebula. Her hair slid over the nodules of her spine, and he longed to graze her skin, the way her hair did, with impunity. Clarke rolled her neck to shift her hair off her back, and shrugged herself into her robe.

“Five minutes for finishing touches, class,” she said without looking at them. Then she vanished through the back door. 

Ella leaned over to Bellamy. “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

Bellamy started, tearing his eyes away from the place Clarke had just been. Ella, though, was gesturing to his drawing. “Excellent proportions,” she added, and he realized she was talking of Clarke as the object of the artist’ eye, not as a person.

He was spared a reply though, as Clarke breezed back into the room. Now, instead of her robe, and the promise of nothing else, she wore a loose shirt and black jeans tucked into riding boots. 

“Boards up,” she said, perching again on the edge of the chaise. Her similarity to her recent position made Bellamy’s throat tighten. Then he was distracted by the command. 

“Boards up?” he whispered to Ella. She’d already collected her canvas, and she looked at Bellamy with something akin to pity.

Bellamy watched as the class lined their canvases on the windowsills, and Clarke offered a quick critique to each individual. She had slid smoothly from model to teacher; she didn’t even seem to notice that the drawings were of her.

“Second canvas,” Clarke said. The students quick-shuffled the first piece of art for the second one. Ella elbowed Bellamy on her way up. You too! her eyes seemed to say. Bellamy set his drawing on the edge, at the end of the others. It gave him plenty of time to get nervous.

“Ella,” Clarke said. “This is lovely. You’ve really captured the wind like Waterson.” The students crowded around her piece. In the picture, Clarke’s hair lifted a few inches off her shoulder, and her hands appeared to be flattening down her hair as if she were straining against it. Her legs bent forward, while her body bent back; it was an accurate representation of the pose Clarke had done, but in Ella’s rendition, each of Clarke’s muscles were tensed at a different angle than the static one in the room. Her commentary for Ella ran along the same lines as everyone else, and like everyone else, she scribbled down a mark, showed it to Ella only, and then moved on.

“Now Bellamy.” Twelve pairs of eyes swiveled to Clarke and Bellamy, and then to his drawing. No one spoke. “Um,” she said, drawing her hand to her mouth. Several moments passed in silence. The students eyes darted between the two. Clarke could hear her heartbeat in her ears, and she knew she needed to say something. She settled on, “There’s no outward motion in this.” That didn’t sound like a compliment to Bellamy. “There’s also no chair.” She drew a line with her finger between Bellamy and Ella’s pieces. 

It was true. Ella’s sketch had Clarke in it and the invisible sensation of wind, but it also had the puddled sheet, and the weathered chaise. Even the windows were penciled in at the edges.

In Bellamy’s piece, there was only Clarke. Without the chaise as a focal point, Clarke seemed to support herself. She balanced forward on her feet, and without the wind, her arms wrapped around her head looked more like it was for comfort, or protection, than display. Her eyes looked off into the distance with an intensity that belied her defensive pose. It was not found in the other portraits--in the others,as in life, her eyes were closed. Clarke’s curls tickled her ears and shoulders, escaping from the cage of her fingers. It was a portrait of a woman blooming out. She held her energy in her core, and it was obvious in the lines that this girl was trying to keep it in. 

It wasn’t technically accurate. Her hair was too long, her hips too wide. He’d drawn her eyes open when they hadn’t been, and he hadn’t gotten around to the cleft in her chin. It was the best one, Clarke thought, though she couldn’t say it aloud.

“You get a fifty percent in my class Blake,” Clarke said. “Class dismissed.” She rested her hand briefly on Bellamy’s arm. “Come back again--we’ll have a model next time, so I can stand over you and judge you.” The students drifted back to their places

“Fifty percent,” Bellamy said. He was disappointed, although he didn’t know why. Around him, the students stirred, gathering their bags and supplies.

“That’s full marks you know,” Ella said with a sly smile.

“What?” Bellamy asked, jerking his gaze up from the portrait he’d drawn.

“Fifty percent. We get graded on both poses, and you only did the one.” Ella smirked. “No one gets full marks in Ms. Griffin’s class.”

Bellamy smiled. Maybe he would come back after all.


End file.
